Why Yoga??
Girls- Please Read: Yoga has really changed the way i go about my daily life and how important it is to get into differant types of fitness. Enjoy!!
Why Yoga?
The first time I saw someone practicing yoga I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was highly attracted, there being something profoundly "right" about what I was seeing; on the other hand there was a mysterious, exotic, and ancient air about it that made me nervous. I had never seen anything like it before. It seemed powerful, almost bizarre. The man I was watching obviously knew what he was doing, and he seemed to have access to a hidden reservoir of energy.
Questions like "Why in the world?" and "What for?" raced through my mind. Reactions like "So what," "crazy," and "fanatic" filtered through, and yet I was deeply impressed. I wanted to know how twisting and bending your body could have anything remotely to do with God, life, meaning, or happiness. What was yoga all about? What relationship could it possibly have with anything? With my life, my perceived problems, global issues, despair, hopelessness, the alleviation of suffering, making a difference, enlightenment ... ? And like many things in life, we can never know in advance the full impact something is going to have on us. Reasons for our initial involvement may pale and lose importance as we move deeper. We change and learn, often in unexpected ways.
The simple perspective I have come up with, through all the years and thousands of hours of practicing yoga and meditation since that first exposure, is that yoga makes you feel good. It's relaxing. It's energizing. It's strengthening. You feel better at the end of a session than before you began, and life runs more smoothly when you maintain a consistent discipline than when you don't. Yoga enhances your experience of life. It changes your perspective. You thereby find yourself spontaneously embracing a larger, more accurate conception of who you are, how life works, and what God is. You start seeing things differently, with less distortion - which results in more peace of mind, better health, more enthusiasm for life, and an ever-growing authentic sense of inner well-being.
As you practice yoga and meditation regularly, this subtle sense of feeling good gradually becomes so pervasive, so natural and genuine, so much a part of you that it carries over into the whole of your life. And in doing so it helps clarify your deepest longings, motivations, and aspirations, thereby restoring optimism, hope, meaning, and purpose to life.
This transition will be smooth and easy much of the time (even unnoticed) because it's so natural, but some of the time it may not be smooth or easy. It may be damn hard and painful. But this is only because growth hurts when you resist change, and most of us have an inclination to resist change in an attempt to remain comfortable by staying the same. But life is change. Change happens, especially when you're involved in a powerful transformative process such as yoga. You grow. You can't not change. That's just the way it is. It's how things work. Therefore, in order to stay comfortable as you grow, you must flow with the changes and not attempt to remain the same - just as you buy a new pair of shoes for your son or daughter when their feet have outgrown the pair they've been wearing. It's not reasonable for them to continue wearing their favorite shoes when they no longer fit. You get rid of the old ones and buy a new pair. But the reason you need new ones is that their feet have grown. Growth has occurred. Their foot grew, the shoe became too small, their foot hurt. Pain is not an inherent part of being a foot. Nor is it an inherent part of growth.
Your feet cannot be comfortable in a pair of shoes that has become too small. Nor can an emerging flower be comfortable by staying inside its protective husk that has gradually become too tight. Nor a growing chick inside its shell. Nor can you be comfortable in old belief structures and limited self-concepts. You must slough off the husk and allow yourself to open and bloom. You must willingly let go of any belief structure that limits your awareness and causes your experience of growth to be painful. You must let go of that which until now has been a protective coating or shield - and bloom. With the blooming will come a new sense of self and new appreciation for life.
The confidence necessary to do this will accrue naturally from the practice. You learn to open up by relaxing, being fearless, and becoming increasingly defenseless. Defensiveness, or shielding, is what creates the discomfort associated with growth. Changes start happening, changes that may not always be initially welcome, and rather than flow with the change and grow, many of us choose to stop the process and stave off the change in an attempt to remain the same a little longer. We contract in order to protect ourselves. We stop the practice the moment it starts working, usually when we start changing in ways we had not anticipated. This is because that which is good for us is not always recognized as such right off the bat. It's not uncommon to become fearful, defensive, and self-protective, to mistrust the process and revert to old ways of being. The problem with doing this, however, you discover, is that it hurts more not to change. Increasingly, then, you embrace change. You realize it's the movement of fulfillment. And when you are no longer resisting growth it will be experienced by you as less traumatic and more joyful. It feels good to go with the flow and grow.
We all like feeling good. We all want peace of mind. We all enjoy being joyful, peaceful, energized, and relaxed. Surely, there's no confusion about this. Yet most of us would readily admit that we are not feeling as good as we might. We may, in fact, believe that anything more than a transient, spurious happiness is not actually attainable. But we would also like to feel better and actually be happy. We want the truth, come what may, but we'd also like the joy and fulfillment of a meaningful life if at all possible.
We all have different visions of happiness and fulfillment, and different strategies with which to pursue them as we attempt to ascertain what's true. Yet, regardless of our differences, all of us are doing those things that we think will make us happy - or at least less miserable, less susceptible to future suffering. The way we do this is based on our current personal understanding of how life works. We pursue different courses of action because our understanding, inclinations, and circumstances vary. The essential motivation is the same, however. We want the truth - and we want to be happy.
You may want something other than just "feeling good," however, something more than a vague, nonspecific happiness. You may want a new car, a washing machine, a master's degree, or a better relationship. You may want spiritual enlightenment. But would you still want the new car, the washer, the degree, the relationship, or the enlightenment if in having it it did not also make you feel good? Would you want these things if they made you feel bad?
It's difficult to want something, even if it's good for you, if you think you'll feel worse as a result of having it. Therefore, we must be very alert for self-deception. How much of your pursuit of truth is tainted or twisted by what you want that truth to be? If Truth causes you to suffer more than you already do, would you still want it? This is an important question one that leads many people not to want to know the truth, and one that you are answering one way or the other as evidenced in the way you live your life.
The various things we desire and pursue, therefore, and the many ways we attempt to grow and change are what we perceive to be the means to happiness. We think, "If only I were ten pounds lighter," "If only I weren't so shy and fearful," "If only I could do that pose better," "If only I had some money," "If only someone loved me, if only things were somehow different, if only I were different from how I am ... then I'd be happy." We think that having this or that, or being this or that way, will do the trick.
The problem, though, is that we don't actually know what will make us happy. We've received many of our desires, things we thought would make us happy, changed ourselves in every conceivable way, and still feel largely unsatisfied. The fulfillment of desire is generally not very satisfying in the larger sense. We realize that what we thought we wanted wasn't it after all. It didn't give us lasting happiness. A new desire always arises. Besides, there are many things in this world that can temporarily make us feel good, but that are not very good for us and that eventually make us feel bad.
The thrust of yoga, in contrast to the pursuit of your desire as a means to happiness, is aimed at the monumental, life-changing discovery of who and what you truly are. This is how yoga works, how it makes you feel good. It helps you experience the truth, your truth - which, you discover, is goodness. Your basic nature is happiness.
You don't know this at first, however. You don't know this is what you'll find. But when you do experience your truth, free of every idea you now believe about yourself and free of every hope you have about what that truth is, you will spontaneously feel exquisite inside and be happy. And this is no small thing. This is big, huge. And when you are in touch with that basic goodness, with the pure Consciousness that you are, all that you desire will be in alignment with your deepest truth and will therefore come to you easily as a manifestation - or proof - of your congruence with Truth. The fulfillment of desire will then be fulfilling because you are in accord with Truth, in harmony with the Oneness.
The ramifications of knowing your truth will be enormous. You will begin to live with a security, a confidence, and an inner psychological peace born of an unshakable conviction in your own personal worth. You will experience self-love and appreciation and will thereby begin to feel full enough to reach out and love others. You will also feel increasingly grateful to the creative God Force for the privilege of citizenship and the joy of participation in the endless creativity of the event called life.
Now, let's start with a brief overview of the what and why of yoga. What are the benefits of practicing yoga? And why would this be of interest to someone who has never been involved with yoga before?
Let me say first that yoga, like brushing your teeth, is an acquired preference. When I was young I didn't like to brush my teeth. It required my parents' daily reminding to get me to do it. Now I brush my teeth not only as a prevention against tooth decay, but because I prefer the way my mouth feels when it's clean.
The same has been true with my yoga practice. At first it took conscious discipline and deliberate effort to establish a daily practice. Now I practice not only because it's good for me, but because I prefer the way I feel when I do. I feel clean and new, much like the way brushing my teeth makes my mouth feel. The entire motivation has changed. Yoga helps keep my energy-tone at a level I like. This can easily become your most compelling reason for doing yoga. Then, just as you gladly brush your teeth every day, so will you gladly practice yoga. Brushing once a week is not the same as spending a few minutes daily.
Please understand that what I am attempting to describe and put into words is an activity that is essentially nonverbal. Words, by their very nature, will never quite convey the meaning. The description can never fully communicate the described. The explanation is pallid and anemic in comparison to the richness of the actual experience, and it's the actual experience of yoga that concerns us.
Words, however, can prepare you for the experience. They can foster motivation, which inevitably leads to success and understanding. The word water, for example, will not quench your thirst. But it may encourage you to continue looking for water until you find a well or drinking fountain. The words and analogies I have chosen, therefore, though not entirely precise, are accurate enough to give you a foretaste of my meaning. Be playful with the analogies, as I have been in using them, and listen for the meaning that lies beyond the word.
Girls- Please Read: Yoga has really changed the way i go about my daily life and how important it is to get into differant types of fitness. Enjoy!!
Why Yoga?
The first time I saw someone practicing yoga I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was highly attracted, there being something profoundly "right" about what I was seeing; on the other hand there was a mysterious, exotic, and ancient air about it that made me nervous. I had never seen anything like it before. It seemed powerful, almost bizarre. The man I was watching obviously knew what he was doing, and he seemed to have access to a hidden reservoir of energy.
Questions like "Why in the world?" and "What for?" raced through my mind. Reactions like "So what," "crazy," and "fanatic" filtered through, and yet I was deeply impressed. I wanted to know how twisting and bending your body could have anything remotely to do with God, life, meaning, or happiness. What was yoga all about? What relationship could it possibly have with anything? With my life, my perceived problems, global issues, despair, hopelessness, the alleviation of suffering, making a difference, enlightenment ... ? And like many things in life, we can never know in advance the full impact something is going to have on us. Reasons for our initial involvement may pale and lose importance as we move deeper. We change and learn, often in unexpected ways.
The simple perspective I have come up with, through all the years and thousands of hours of practicing yoga and meditation since that first exposure, is that yoga makes you feel good. It's relaxing. It's energizing. It's strengthening. You feel better at the end of a session than before you began, and life runs more smoothly when you maintain a consistent discipline than when you don't. Yoga enhances your experience of life. It changes your perspective. You thereby find yourself spontaneously embracing a larger, more accurate conception of who you are, how life works, and what God is. You start seeing things differently, with less distortion - which results in more peace of mind, better health, more enthusiasm for life, and an ever-growing authentic sense of inner well-being.
As you practice yoga and meditation regularly, this subtle sense of feeling good gradually becomes so pervasive, so natural and genuine, so much a part of you that it carries over into the whole of your life. And in doing so it helps clarify your deepest longings, motivations, and aspirations, thereby restoring optimism, hope, meaning, and purpose to life.
This transition will be smooth and easy much of the time (even unnoticed) because it's so natural, but some of the time it may not be smooth or easy. It may be damn hard and painful. But this is only because growth hurts when you resist change, and most of us have an inclination to resist change in an attempt to remain comfortable by staying the same. But life is change. Change happens, especially when you're involved in a powerful transformative process such as yoga. You grow. You can't not change. That's just the way it is. It's how things work. Therefore, in order to stay comfortable as you grow, you must flow with the changes and not attempt to remain the same - just as you buy a new pair of shoes for your son or daughter when their feet have outgrown the pair they've been wearing. It's not reasonable for them to continue wearing their favorite shoes when they no longer fit. You get rid of the old ones and buy a new pair. But the reason you need new ones is that their feet have grown. Growth has occurred. Their foot grew, the shoe became too small, their foot hurt. Pain is not an inherent part of being a foot. Nor is it an inherent part of growth.
Your feet cannot be comfortable in a pair of shoes that has become too small. Nor can an emerging flower be comfortable by staying inside its protective husk that has gradually become too tight. Nor a growing chick inside its shell. Nor can you be comfortable in old belief structures and limited self-concepts. You must slough off the husk and allow yourself to open and bloom. You must willingly let go of any belief structure that limits your awareness and causes your experience of growth to be painful. You must let go of that which until now has been a protective coating or shield - and bloom. With the blooming will come a new sense of self and new appreciation for life.
The confidence necessary to do this will accrue naturally from the practice. You learn to open up by relaxing, being fearless, and becoming increasingly defenseless. Defensiveness, or shielding, is what creates the discomfort associated with growth. Changes start happening, changes that may not always be initially welcome, and rather than flow with the change and grow, many of us choose to stop the process and stave off the change in an attempt to remain the same a little longer. We contract in order to protect ourselves. We stop the practice the moment it starts working, usually when we start changing in ways we had not anticipated. This is because that which is good for us is not always recognized as such right off the bat. It's not uncommon to become fearful, defensive, and self-protective, to mistrust the process and revert to old ways of being. The problem with doing this, however, you discover, is that it hurts more not to change. Increasingly, then, you embrace change. You realize it's the movement of fulfillment. And when you are no longer resisting growth it will be experienced by you as less traumatic and more joyful. It feels good to go with the flow and grow.
We all like feeling good. We all want peace of mind. We all enjoy being joyful, peaceful, energized, and relaxed. Surely, there's no confusion about this. Yet most of us would readily admit that we are not feeling as good as we might. We may, in fact, believe that anything more than a transient, spurious happiness is not actually attainable. But we would also like to feel better and actually be happy. We want the truth, come what may, but we'd also like the joy and fulfillment of a meaningful life if at all possible.
We all have different visions of happiness and fulfillment, and different strategies with which to pursue them as we attempt to ascertain what's true. Yet, regardless of our differences, all of us are doing those things that we think will make us happy - or at least less miserable, less susceptible to future suffering. The way we do this is based on our current personal understanding of how life works. We pursue different courses of action because our understanding, inclinations, and circumstances vary. The essential motivation is the same, however. We want the truth - and we want to be happy.
You may want something other than just "feeling good," however, something more than a vague, nonspecific happiness. You may want a new car, a washing machine, a master's degree, or a better relationship. You may want spiritual enlightenment. But would you still want the new car, the washer, the degree, the relationship, or the enlightenment if in having it it did not also make you feel good? Would you want these things if they made you feel bad?
It's difficult to want something, even if it's good for you, if you think you'll feel worse as a result of having it. Therefore, we must be very alert for self-deception. How much of your pursuit of truth is tainted or twisted by what you want that truth to be? If Truth causes you to suffer more than you already do, would you still want it? This is an important question one that leads many people not to want to know the truth, and one that you are answering one way or the other as evidenced in the way you live your life.
The various things we desire and pursue, therefore, and the many ways we attempt to grow and change are what we perceive to be the means to happiness. We think, "If only I were ten pounds lighter," "If only I weren't so shy and fearful," "If only I could do that pose better," "If only I had some money," "If only someone loved me, if only things were somehow different, if only I were different from how I am ... then I'd be happy." We think that having this or that, or being this or that way, will do the trick.
The problem, though, is that we don't actually know what will make us happy. We've received many of our desires, things we thought would make us happy, changed ourselves in every conceivable way, and still feel largely unsatisfied. The fulfillment of desire is generally not very satisfying in the larger sense. We realize that what we thought we wanted wasn't it after all. It didn't give us lasting happiness. A new desire always arises. Besides, there are many things in this world that can temporarily make us feel good, but that are not very good for us and that eventually make us feel bad.
The thrust of yoga, in contrast to the pursuit of your desire as a means to happiness, is aimed at the monumental, life-changing discovery of who and what you truly are. This is how yoga works, how it makes you feel good. It helps you experience the truth, your truth - which, you discover, is goodness. Your basic nature is happiness.
You don't know this at first, however. You don't know this is what you'll find. But when you do experience your truth, free of every idea you now believe about yourself and free of every hope you have about what that truth is, you will spontaneously feel exquisite inside and be happy. And this is no small thing. This is big, huge. And when you are in touch with that basic goodness, with the pure Consciousness that you are, all that you desire will be in alignment with your deepest truth and will therefore come to you easily as a manifestation - or proof - of your congruence with Truth. The fulfillment of desire will then be fulfilling because you are in accord with Truth, in harmony with the Oneness.
The ramifications of knowing your truth will be enormous. You will begin to live with a security, a confidence, and an inner psychological peace born of an unshakable conviction in your own personal worth. You will experience self-love and appreciation and will thereby begin to feel full enough to reach out and love others. You will also feel increasingly grateful to the creative God Force for the privilege of citizenship and the joy of participation in the endless creativity of the event called life.
Now, let's start with a brief overview of the what and why of yoga. What are the benefits of practicing yoga? And why would this be of interest to someone who has never been involved with yoga before?
Let me say first that yoga, like brushing your teeth, is an acquired preference. When I was young I didn't like to brush my teeth. It required my parents' daily reminding to get me to do it. Now I brush my teeth not only as a prevention against tooth decay, but because I prefer the way my mouth feels when it's clean.
The same has been true with my yoga practice. At first it took conscious discipline and deliberate effort to establish a daily practice. Now I practice not only because it's good for me, but because I prefer the way I feel when I do. I feel clean and new, much like the way brushing my teeth makes my mouth feel. The entire motivation has changed. Yoga helps keep my energy-tone at a level I like. This can easily become your most compelling reason for doing yoga. Then, just as you gladly brush your teeth every day, so will you gladly practice yoga. Brushing once a week is not the same as spending a few minutes daily.
Please understand that what I am attempting to describe and put into words is an activity that is essentially nonverbal. Words, by their very nature, will never quite convey the meaning. The description can never fully communicate the described. The explanation is pallid and anemic in comparison to the richness of the actual experience, and it's the actual experience of yoga that concerns us.
Words, however, can prepare you for the experience. They can foster motivation, which inevitably leads to success and understanding. The word water, for example, will not quench your thirst. But it may encourage you to continue looking for water until you find a well or drinking fountain. The words and analogies I have chosen, therefore, though not entirely precise, are accurate enough to give you a foretaste of my meaning. Be playful with the analogies, as I have been in using them, and listen for the meaning that lies beyond the word.
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